The local group that oversees Metro safety is slated to inspect the transit agency’s tracks next month, resolving a nearly seven-month dispute with Metro over access to the system it is supposed to monitor.
The Tri-State Oversight Committee has tentatively scheduled several days of inspections for December, Chairman Eric Madison told The Examiner on Monday. However, he said, there has been no decision on how much notice the committee needs to give the agency before inspecting the tracks in the future.
» WHY: The Tri-State Oversight Committee says it needs access to Metro’s tracks during live working conditions for a federally required audit that it conducts every three years. The group needs to make sure the transit agency is complying with safety rules put into place after track workers were killed several years ago. Trains are supposed to slow down in work zones and track workers are supposed to use hand signals to communicate.» THE PROBLEM: The transit agency had initially let the committee members and their hired consultants stand behind a train operator on a working train to monitir train speeds and the hand signals from track workers. But the oversight group said that was not sufficient. They asked in May to have access to the live tracks, accompanied by an escort. The transit agency’s chief safety officer told them no, saying it was not safe.» THE DELAY: The back and forth with the safety officer continued.
General Manager John Catoe
has said he was not told of the impasse until early this month. During the dispute, two workers were killed in separate track accidents.
Still, the scheduled inspection is progress, as the oversight group first sought the inspections in May.
Metro’s chief safety officer initially denied the committee access to any live tracks, even with an escort, saying it would not be safe. In the past, committee members said, they had inspected tracks but gone through a different division of the transit agency to arrange the visits.
The struggle to get access became emblematic of the committee’s lack of power over the transit agency. The six-member oversight committee has no office, no permanent Web site and the committee communicated solely with midlevel managers, never meeting with the board of directors members until last week. Some of Metro’s top officials did not even know the committee existed.
The struggle to get access became emblematic of the committee’s lack of power over the transit agency. The six-member oversight committee has no office, no permanent Web site and the committee communicated solely with midlevel managers, never meeting with the board of directors members until last week. Some of Metro’s top officials did not even know the committee existed.
Furthermore, the Tri-State Oversight Committee has limited ability to force Metro to take action. The committee’s sole power is that it can ask federal officials to withhold up to 5 percent of Metro’s federal transit dollars. But it has never done so.
The stalled inspections, first reported by The Washington Post, are the latest example of the committee’s unheeded efforts.
As early as last November, the committee had asked Metro to look at analyzing the safety of putting Metro’s oldest rail cars in the middle of trains because federal investigators called them uncrashworthy.
The transit agency ignored the request, then switched the railcars only after the deadly June 22 train crash involving some of the rail cars. Yet it did so without providing the committee any proof that it was safer, The Examiner first reported.
Metro’s board of directors unanimously voted last week for all Metro employees to “cooperate fully” with the committee and report back to the board anytime it denied a request from the oversight group.
